Decade
3 ads from the 1990s in the GOAT database.
Richard Branson drove a Sherman tank through Times Square and crushed a wall of Coca-Cola cans to launch Virgin Cola in the US. The product didn't survive the soda wars, but the stunt did — a textbook example of using earned media instead of paid impressions.
When Jobs came back to a near-dead Apple, the first thing he shipped wasn't a product — it was a worldview. Einstein, Gandhi, Ali, Dylan, narrated like a prayer. The company spent a decade earning the right to that voice.
A group of friends yell a single guttural word down the phone at each other while watching a game, and that's the whole ad. It captured exactly how young men actually talked to each other before social media made everything performative, and the catchphrase escaped into real life for years. Proof that recording something true beats scripting something clever.